[860]
[Amongst the evils for which the fire-festivals are deemed remedies the
foremost is cattle-disease, and cattle-disease is often supposed to be
an effect of witchcraft.]
This suspicion is confirmed when we examine the evils for which the
bonfires and torches were supposed to provide a remedy. Foremost,
perhaps, among these evils we may reckon the diseases of cattle; and of
all the ills that witches are believed to work there is probably none
which is so constantly insisted on as the harm they do to the herds,
particularly by stealing the milk from the cows.[861] Now it is
significant that the need-fire, which may perhaps be regarded as the
parent of the periodic fire-festivals, is kindled above all as a remedy
for a murrain or other disease of cattle; and the circumstance suggests,
what on general grounds seems probable, that the custom of kindling the
need-fire goes back to a time when the ancestors of the European peoples
subsisted chiefly on the products of their herds, and when agriculture
as yet played a subordinate part in their lives. Witches and wolves are
the two great foes still dreaded by the herdsman in many parts of
Europe;[862] and we need not wonder that he should resort to fire as a
powerful means of banning them both. Among Slavonic peoples it appears
that the foes whom the need-fire is designed to combat are not so much
living witches as vampyres and other evil spirits,[863] and the
ceremony, as we saw, aims rather at repelling these baleful beings than
at actually consuming them in the flames.
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